


Universally Challenged

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, M/M, Teen!fic, University Challenge, University!fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-23
Updated: 2011-06-23
Packaged: 2017-10-20 16:19:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/214649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of how Sherlock Holmes captained a team to appear on University Challenge, and just what happened when he did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Universally Challenged

“Victor Trevor, originally from Norfolk, studying Politics, Psychology and Sociology.”

“Sebastian Wilkes, from Ascot, Berkshire, studying economics.”

“And the captain,”

“Sherlock Holmes, from Harrow in London, studying Law.”

“Lucas Smith-Henderson, from Guildford in Surrey, studying Natural Sciences.”

The Captain surveyed his crew, his passengers and his ship; then smirked. There was an opposition, some team from _Warwick_ or something, some backwoods place where they probably all spoke with glottal stops and watched Coronation Street, but he wasn’t listening to their pointless introductions. It didn’t matter who they were, not when they were about to become a statistic – merely one in a long list of those who thought they could but, oh, bless the poor things, _just weren’t up to standard_.

I am your Captain. Turn to me with questions and I shall answer all.

Generally he treated his peers with a sort of vague contempt; that kind of disinterested dismissal that calls arrogance and smugness its bedfellows. Even those on his team were not exempt. Victor was bright, no doubt about that, but wasn’t he just an inferior version of their Captain? His father’s knowledge of the law had been passed down unnecessarily. An extra-curricular interest in literature and the arts may have earned him his place but not to the Captain, oh no; he had no time for the rewarding of frivolous pursuits. Seb knew maths; that was his redeeming feature. His singular redeeming feature. Lucas’ position was equally as omissible – it’s admirable that you’re reading Natural Sciences, old chap, but we already have one scientist here, so it’d probably be better for you to just pop off home now, okay?

Numbers, numbers, it was always the _numbers_.

“No, you can’t just enter by yourself. You need a team.” They’d said, and that was final.

Apparently there was something in the rules that did not permit a solo stint on that hallowed set. Apparently the BBC weren’t going to change that to pander to the outlandish request of some public school prick with a spoilt attitude. He’d removed the tape from the answer machine and stored it in his sock drawer like a battle scar hidden under his shirt.

The Captain inclined his head and waited for the signal. With his chin at that level he had the peasants in his peripheries – there truly was nothing like catching glimpses of those with their banners and their hands clasped together. Perhaps they were praying for him, he didn’t care. He didn’t need the pleas of strangers to a God proven non-existent and ineffectual by his own scientific Bible, not when he had the coursing of adrenaline-diluted blood through his veins and the buzz and crack of synapses telling him: yes, Sherlock Holmes, you are fucking amazing.

He did not need anyone else to tell him that.

His heart throbbed in his chest, he steepled his fingers in an affected nonchalance that came easily to him, that disguised the hammering of his pulse reassuring that _the world can rest easy, it’s okay, you’re still alive_.

One.

One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four…

Two.

The number of polynucleotide strands in a DNA helix.

Three.

The Holy Trinity: The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit are not one but are God.

Four.

The efficient cause, the matter, the end and the form. Aristotle’s four causes of nature.

Five.

C, G, D, A, E, B, G flat, D flat, A flat, E flat, B flat, F.

Six.

Of course, the flavours of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom.

Seven.

Dividing a vulgar fraction by seven creates a repeating decimal pattern which, if arranged in ascending order, allows one to determine which of the digits the decimal number will start with in the calculation.

Eight.

Derived from late fifteenth century lexeme ‘eighte’, from the earlier form of ‘ehte’ (early thirteenth century, perhaps?), _definitely_ from the Old English eahta/æhta, Proto-Germanic strain.

Nine.

1001, the binary complement of number six (0110). Coincidentally, the number nine is just the number six turned upside-

“Your first starter for ten.” Jeremy Paxman booms lethargically; Sherlock Holmes drops his chin so fast it almost hits his chest.

“The first states that a straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points, the fourth states that all right angles are congruent. The fifth is the-”

“Sidney Sussex, Holmes.”

“Euclid’s theorems.” The Captain breezes without a second’s thought. Ugh, too obvious; he learnt Euclid when his classmates were struggling with Pythagoras. Paxman nods gently as if submitting to Sherlock’s excessive greatness and moves on.

“Correct. Your bonuses, Sidney Sussex, are on words which contain all five vowels only once.”

A-E-O-I-U. Androecium.

I-E-A-O-U. Pithecanthropus.

O-U-E-A-I. Housemaid.

“Sherlock,” One of his teammates mutters after the monopolising display; he isn’t sure which one it is and frankly can’t bring himself to care – he’s concentrating. “We do know some of these; can’t you let us at least answer.”

The Captain smiles and ignores. Lucas sits back in his chair and lets out a sigh, but doesn’t begin preparing himself for this monotony to continue. He should, really. It would help him.

“Ten points for this: the largest number whose factorial is less than ten to the power one hundred, what two digit number links the year of the four emperors in Roman history-”

“Warwick, Hamilton.”

The boy dares to answer first.

“Fifty-eight?”

“Incorrect, you lose five points. The Carlisle to Tyneside trunk road, and the age at which Ronald Reagan was first elected President.”

“Sidney Sussex, Holmes.”

“Sixty-nine.” Sherlock purrs; every straight female in the room gets a simultaneous shiver. He rolls his shoulders and then his eyes, the attention feeling like the warm glow of a balmy summer’s evening. Or, it would, if he had ever lain outside in the meadows on one of England’s rare warm summer’s evenings like a heroine in a romance novel. He preferred to sit indoors. People tended to be outside.

Establishing a detachment from the start was integral to a positive learning environment; the inexorably unapproachable are rarely approached and achieving this status was high on the young Holmes’ list of priorities. A(n) (im)polite notice on the door was too primary school, below his intellect but not below his moral compass. The only way to succeed in total alienation was to become unbearable. Sherlock was good at that. Unfortunately, when the situation soon arose, it became apparent that he wasn’t very good at becoming bearable again.

“Your bonuses are on a _word_. Firstly for five: a word meaning so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring-” _Clichéd, banal, trite, prosaic?_ “-what word first meant a feudal service which was compulsory for all and therefore commonplace?”

Yes. Banal. _Boringly ordinary and lacking in originality_. System died out mid-eighteenth century in France; the _four banal_ oven where peasants used to bake their bread. Obvious.

“Banal.” Sherlock states. He’s always found answering a question with an upward, self-doubting inflection to be one of the worst traits of imbeciles used to disguise their deficiency in intellect.

“Correct.” Paxman affirms and Sherlock feels the safety of his superciliousness like a strong pat on the back, or a gentle caress on the arm if he weren’t so adverse to the idea of strangers touching him.

The next three questions are as dire as the first. Some nonsense about French poetry which Sherlock doesn’t remember acquiring but is able to rattle off far more information than is necessary to gain the five points. Jeremy observes him through suspicious eyes, unsure whether to offer this boy respect or to insist on his being brought down a peg or two. He continues with the stupidly easy questions anyway, all the time with a curious furrowed brow and an inflection that seems erroneous when contrasted with his usual lacklustre delivery.

A picture round follows a scientific problem that Sherlock solves instantly. A table of elements appears on the screens before them with a value missing. A Captain feels his world centre in to the television.

\--

The umbrella had entered first, then his brother. He strode into the room like he was forty years older than his current foray into the double decade, but that was always Mycroft’s way. He was middle-aged at six years old. One day, when Sherlock must have been seven – actually, it was four days before his seventh birthday, now he can recall – Nanny approached Mycroft with the exaggerated excitement adults always affect to children under twelve, spouting chapter and verse about the zoo, oh, the zoo! You can see all the animals, like the tiger – rargh! – and the funny waddling penguins, and how about the great big elephant with his great big ears, mmm? Mycroft had looked up at her through languid lids and announced: “I have no interest in seeing such ridiculous creatures, and if I ever held such inclinations I would travel to whichever continent the animal resided in and seek them out myself.”

Nanny never took them to the zoo. That was the only time Sherlock ever thanked his brother for anything.

“I didn’t do it for you.” Mycroft raised his chin as if addressing God in kin, “I hate zoos.”

He then exited the library, leaving Sherlock to re-immerse himself in the _Physikalische Zeitschrift_ , unsure whether to feel triumphant or forlorn.

But it was Mycroft’s entrance into a room that was the cause of his confusion, now. The man with the brolly paused by the desk, kicking the door closed with his heel. Sherlock did not move, or speak, or show any signs of acknowledging his brother. Mycroft, in turn, made a noise like one emits after discovering chewing gum on the sole of one’s favourite and most expensive shoes.

“No Holmes should enjoy living in _squalor_.” He intoned with a sweeping glance around the room. It was possible that this glance could have taken in the piles and piles of documents positioned at various and multiple places on the carpet; the suspicious stains that an untrained eye would not be able to name, let alone categorise; the books that lay open to specific pages, spines groaning at the abuse; the cups and _cups_ of liquids that may have been drinks but could also have been chemical samples. Sherlock wasn’t about to look up and check.

“It isn’t squalor,” The student was quick to respond, “merely mild disarray. They’d never let me get to ‘squalor’; there are cleaners. Irregularly, but they exist.”

Sherlock’s university digs were uncommon in various ways. Uncommonly spacious, uncommonly well-situated, uncommonly furnished and uncommonly expensive. Cambridge had provided the first two, his father the latter. The furnishing, however, was all his own work. Standard-issue bed, desk, chair, lamp and cupboards had been unceremoniously dumped in a skip and been replaced by a mishmash of both real and imitation Victorian furniture. Visitors – rare and largely unwelcome, restricted to obligation, delivery of instruments and “there’s some get-together of sorts going on downstairs; you in?”, always met with the negative – were wont to remark at how swiftly (and arrogantly, they thought but didn’t say) he had made the place seem like his own. He had that knack. Sherlock wanted no part in the establishment save for a First and a place where he could be left alone and put his shit without someone causing a fuss about health hazards and moral wrongs. Cambridge, on the whole, were willing to turn a blind eye; his fellow students learned not to give a toss about explosions after assurances from detached authority that they were routine and _relatively_ unlikely to cause physical harm and/or death.

Back to Mycroft by the door and the desk.

He coughed, as if the expulsion of air was supposed to make Sherlock reconsider his plans and admit that yes, brother dear, I am jeopardising the reputation of our family name and plunging us all into deep social turbulence. So I will kindly stop. Yours sincerely, Sherlock Holmes. P.S. Sorry about your bathtub.

It didn’t; the elder Holmes was forced to speak again.

“What you are doing is unreasonable and infantile. You must desist at once.” He droned, amusing Sherlock with the way his cheeks appeared to flap and wobble with every movement of his mouth. Mycroft, at his current age of twenty-six, was _magnificently_ fat. He appeared to treat his corpulence almost like an art-form: his movements were barely restricted by his bulk – he carried himself about with a certain poise that seemed to forgive his size rather than highlight it.

Sherlock _hated_ him.

“No.” He responded, still not yet taking his eyes off the paper he was currently scribbling on.

“ _University Challenge_ ,” Mycroft’s insistence was almost venomous, “is not the arena for one of us. You heard what Mummy said-”

“I’m fully aware of what _Mother_ told us both. Perhaps I would feel more inclined to follow her advice if it had not come through a telephone loudspeaker.”

“You know how busy she is.”

“I know how busy I am. So if you _don’t mind_ ,” He waved a dismissive hand. Mycroft’s position did not shift even the slightest of millimetres. “ _Fuck off, Mycroft_.” Sherlock then sang.

“You’ll embarrass us all,” was the equally as tuneful riposte from his brother. At least Sherlock had an excuse, being Grade Eight at the violin (well, Grade Eight _standard_ ; he could never be arsed to actually complete the examinations); Mycroft just enjoyed attempting his sibling’s own game and almost matching him in prowess with only a tiny percentage of the effort.

“And besides,” Mycroft continued, making motions to leave at last, “how you suppose to get a team together whom can actually _tolerate_ you, let alone win… I wish you all the best with _that_.”

Sherlock needed no more than a second to formulate his reply: “I don’t need a team. I’ve got me. Everyone else,” He finally gazed up from his calculations with a stare at Absolute Zero, “is transport.”

\--

Sidney Sussex, Holmes.

 _Pedagogue._

Correct!

 _Specific heat capacity; enthalpy of fusion; enthalpy of vaporisation._

Applause, acceptance, next.

Sidney Sussex, Holmes.

 _Moldova._

Yes, correct.

 _Wilhelm Roentgen; Dennis Gabor; good ol’ Albert Einstein._

The others are getting nervous. Is this really going to go on like this? Can they let him? In their heads while Sherlock fires off more rapid knowledge – _William Pitt the Younger, fagopyrum esculentum_ – they conjure up the enquiry, the friendly but firm investigators sent in to the College just to make sure everything is as you said it was; we’re not accusing you of anything, just making sure! That Holmes boy of yours: he’s a character, isn’t he?

He’s insufferable. We hate him. But he had sex with us so we took a vow of silence.

That makes sense. How old is he? Nineteen? Right, that’s all above board. Studying here? _Law_ , gosh, yes. Criminals ought to beware of that one.

If our reputations didn’t depend on it we would fabricate lies to bring the fucker down.

Well, this all seems regular. Congratulations on reaching the next round; we’ll see you back in the studios very soon! Bye, boys.

\--

Halfway through the recording and Warwick have no hope of ever catching up. They participate in a battle they were never meant to win; the voice-over seems stuck on repeat, never once uttering the title they used to be so proud to own. The fight is now between Sherlock Holmes and himself. He has to know everything. Everything.

“Sidney Sussex, Wilkes.”

The bottom drops out of the world.

“Twenty-three.”

“Correct.” Paxman booms, unable to conceal the pride in his voice as the mathematician gets an opportunity to display his degree.

Twenty-three. Of course. He _knew that_. Obvious, obvious, so _bloody_ obvious: E being 2.718, and pi _obviously_ is 3.14159 _etc._ , so E to the power of pi would be…

As Sherlock shifts in his seat to catch the heathen in his eye-line he is fully aware that this is the end for everything he has had or shared with this man. They sit next to one another, fooling the general public into suppositions of closeness, friendliness, familiarity, but Sherlock Holmes sits next to a corpse. Sebastian Wilkes no longer exists. Perhaps when all this is over, Seb will lean over and offer garbled congratulations in his public school dialect and Sherlock will nod and acknowledge him, inside wondering who this insufferable man is and whether he was ever supposed to know him.

No, that won’t happen.

In seven years and six months time the pair will meet again – Sebastian will call it eight but he won’t be right – introduced as old University “buddies” and the submerged truth will be let slip. The hatred kept secret for so long, boxed away for a greater good will surface through banal chat about a “trick” and the copulation habits of old friends.

\--

It turned out not to be all that difficult, deducing if and who people had been ‘shagging’ the previous night. Generally it was Sherlock. It wasn’t that everyone in his block was gay, oh no, that’d be an absurd ratio. It just so happened that a large percentage of those living in the dorms were willing, when asked, to suck him off. Some did it for money. Most did it for the privilege. Yes, he was hated, but isn’t everyone with power and intelligence and money to exploit? Being hated didn’t make Sherlock any less appealing for his suitors, or any less arrogant. If anything it made him infamous; infamy is always, always better than obscurity.

So his original intentions had been warped into fame and Sherlock found this to be perhaps even more agreeable than his former plan. The distinct nature of his fame allowed him the segregation he wanted whilst simultaneously satisfying the sexual appetite previously satiated by his palm and five fingers; contentment was the sociopath given freedom to indulge his every whim.

Therefore Mycroft’s smug presumption of the difficulty that faced his younger brother turned out to be incorrect. It ended up being very easy, persuading three intelligent members of his college to accompany him to the BBC Television Studios. All it took was a touch of blackmail.

Victor had been overtly homosexual from the moment he met Sherlock Holmes. Before, the closet had been a safe, comforting place for the Trevors’ only son; he’d spent eighteen-and-a-half years of his life there, after all, and one tends to develop attachments to familiar haunts. A lingering darkness and musty scent seemed to follow him around – a coincidence, of course, but an amusing one at that – for he was intensely political and prone to prognosticating deep ruin for the country. He also sometimes forgot personal hygiene. If there were a protest to be staged Victor was the one behind it; unfortunately none seemed to share his passion for exaggerated demonstrations and highlighting the suffering of those worse off. They were all far too rich for that. Having a father for a lawyer gave the boy a complex but also gave him a ‘friend’ in Sherlock. It probably gave him an STD, too, but that still remains debatable.

It was absolutely no surprise to the younger Holmes to find himself pressed up against Trevor’s door after the man’s nineteenth birthday party that year, hands and lips everywhere they shouldn’t be for two respectable young Cambridge undergraduates. Victor had sunk to his knees and almost gnawed at Sherlock’s trousers until the taller boy relented and soon they were both panting and growling furiously; when they had finished and lay crumpled together against the door, Sherlock let out a sigh of disgust that Victor chose to ignore. Call it fabulous insight, call it something much baser, but that night a tolerance had emerged for the boy – a tolerance that proved to be helpful when the task of assembling a team rolled round.

Lucas had been slightly more difficult to acquire, given that he was not so eager to throw himself at the Holmes boy the moment they clapped eyes on one another. Their exchange had been conducted in the highest of secrecies: it gave Sherlock no pleasure to receive coded notes in his post hatch, slightly more to receive the invitation to fuck him vigorously in Laboratory Six in the early hours of Sunday morning. There had been a slight complexity in explaining the large amount of broken glass in the bin (Lucas’ handiwork, of course), but thankfully the frantic scrubbing of the worktops to remove certain suspicious substances went unnoticed. Sherlock had been impressed by the careful selection of location for their trysts, therefore agreed _not_ to inform the entire student body just what Lucas was prone to exclaim in the throws of passion just as long as he brushed up on his general knowledge.

The cheque for a hundred pounds also helped assure Sherlock’s silence.

Sebastian was an interesting individual. If Sherlock was hated for being a prick, Sebastian was congratulated for it. Economics was the bastard of all the subjects, the watering hole for all those with exploded egos and who pronounced “hour” like “ahh”. Upon encountering the man Sherlock's first thought was towards physicality, but rather the brutal, torturous kind; perhaps it was jealousy that made him hate Sebastian – this University isn’t big enough for two arseholes, Wilkes – or perhaps it was the similarities that made him translate his self-loathing to this other individual. Sherlock had been capitalising on his unpleasantness for both fiscal and coital ends, but Sebastian was _succeeding_ in his and that irked him. The two men were too analogous for their paths never to meet, and it was only a matter of time before they collided with a spectacular explosion of vehemence and lust.

“I’m not gay!” Sebastian had cried, rutting against the table as Sherlock’s fingers closed around his belt buckle and began to slip the leather through the loops.

“Neither am I.” Came Sherlock’s reply once the pair were both undressed, spoken into the small of the elder man’s back; he looked at the very end of treatment for acne, his scars from squeezing and scratching were painfully visible like dots of disease across his shoulders. Nausea stirred in Sherlock’s stomach at the prospect of having to touch this brute.

"What?" There was a riposte almost drowned in the groan that followed it, wrung from Sebastian by a well-placed hand. "You've fucked half of the bloody University."

An exaggeration, but not one Sherlock was going to rectify.

"I know." said Sherlock, closing his fingers together slightly and engendering another moan from the man he was about to do the exact same to, "I was under the impression that was what we were doing: lying. If you were going to, I thought I may as well do so myself."

The so vocal Wilkes was soon rendered silent by a hand on his throat – still slicked with the man's own ejaculate, oh how _dramatic_ life had made Sherlock Holmes! – and a promise to destroy his tiny little empire with rumours and gossip and scandal until he remained so unemployable, so despicable and friendless, not even bribery could help him. Sebastian had laughed at Sherlock's only request with a spat back "University Challenge? Is that all?" until a free hand was made use of and the elder student felt himself collapse back into the arms of his barbaric lover. Such masochists, these leaders. They make a show of their power but really all they want to do is _cuddle_. It makes him sick.

\--

Sherlock will hide the stabbing in his heart by quietly humiliating the man. This knowledge would comfort him now.

\--

Here’s the pinnacle, the climax; there’s no tension given their colossal lead but still the fire rages – Warwick strive to repair their annihilated reputation, there must be a record lead or something that Sidney Sussex need to break. Sherlock ignores the idea of such a target: it’ll only kill him more if they don’t achieve it.

If it were possible, Paxman seems even more bored by the outcome. He may be impartial but he’s not doing a very good job of it. After each question there’s a glance over to the right hand table with a plea in the eyes, but each time it is met with blankness in return. They just don’t know anything. If, by anything, Sherlock means ‘things that I know’. Every man has his specific field of knowledge; he can’t help it if his is just _everything_.

He can sense the diminishing of the sand in the timer, this imaginary timer that hangs in front of him like a challenge: how many more can you get before I end it all for you?

Jeremy coughs. Prepares. Shuffles his cards. He’s procrastinating to end the misery for Warwick but this is hardly fair and there’s a part of him that recognises that, so he finally gets the question out:

“How many days does it take Mercury to orbit the sun? You can have ten days either way.”

Mercury. That’s… that’s. That’s the solar system. He…

Sherlock Holmes does not know this.

How had this become possible? He’d read books and he’d learnt about it as a child, of course he had, he remembered uncomplicated science lessons so far below his intellect, about… the Earth, and… it…

Arrogance had made him forget. As he’d grown older and his interests had blossomed – he pored over articles in the paper about murders; unsolved attacks; bodies left to rot in ditches by the side of motorways, evidence obliterated by snow – he hadn’t noticed at the time but things had become… deleted. When his parents and Mycroft left for a month-long summer holiday in France (Sherlock had elected to stay at home to look after Crick, his pet rat and science experiment) he’d endeavoured to learn every nuance of the Gallic language. He’d gotten onto the irregular verbs before discovering he no longer knew how to make beans on toast.

Sherlock stared out into the middle distance, drowning. He floundered through an ocean of facts that now seemed wholly irrelevant: what use was the ability to recite the Greek alphabet when he had no idea about _this_? _This_ was what mattered; this was _now_. A klaxon blared: FAILURE, FAILURE, FAILURE.

He felt a nudge of an elbow in the ribs; Sebastian was there with the request. They’d learnt to indulge the eccentricities of their Captain out of fear, mostly, but now they were interested in the permission to disobey. Sherlock, we know this! Let us buzz, Sherlock.

No.

Sherlock, are you crazy? You know it, so buzz. _Sherlock_! For fuck’s sake- press your bloody buzzer so we can win this thing!

No, no, no, no, _no_.

FAILURE.

“Warwick, Richards.”

“Ninety-eight?”

Paxman beamed like a parent at their child’s graduation: “I’ll accept.”

 _It’s not even right it’s not even fucking right it isn’t right they’ve got it right but IT ISN’T RIGHT BUT I DON’T KNOW IT._

The gong sounded; Sidney Sussex exhaled together like a ritual. All except Sherlock Holmes who sat there like Medusa’s victim, unable to breathe, think, function, hear anything but the blaring of his own inadequacy. He wished to tip back his chair and scream, storming out of the studio in a haze of rage and self-hatred, but he could not. Instead he stayed and listened to the empty praise.

“Bad luck, Warwick, a valiant attempt but I’m afraid we shall have to say goodbye to you. Thank you very much for taking part. Sidney Sussex, well done; we look forward to seeing you in the next stage of the competition.” His bias, for all to see. How professional it was, what an indicator of the Sherlock Holmes talent to make all despise him. “I hope you can join us next time, but until then it’s goodbye from Warwick University…”

Warwick waved half-heartedly.

“Goodbye from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge…”

Three members of the team waved and expressed their parting word.

“…And it’s goodbye from me: goodbye.”

Sherlock waited for the lights to go down and the cameras to stop rolling before he stood up and exited, expensive shoes clomping on the cheap set.

His first thought had been to flee tearfully to the toilets in the manner of a heartbroken teenage girl, but as Sherlock flounced out of the studio without a backwards glance to his team, even he could admit that the situation did not merit such melodrama. Instead he found himself proceeding outside, through the fire exit doors and out to the concrete haven of the car park. As havens went, it wasn't great, but served its purpose magnificently. Sherlock perched himself on the edge of a concrete flowerbed and pulled his cigarette case from his inside jacket pocket; a flicker of his lighter and the fag was alight, ripe and waiting to be pushed between his eager lips and inhaled, sucked on, delighted in as the long overdue nicotine rush made Sherlock feel less human and more godly again.

No, not a god, not yet. Gods do not hate themselves.

Sherlock Holmes hated himself. He always had, in a way – how ironic that self-loathing inevitably accompanies self-gratification! Once greatness becomes inescapable, complacency rears its ugly head and achievements seem dull, boring, predictable, _just that bit not good enough_ to satisfy the stratospheric standards that are obviously unattainable but just… in… reach…

This is a cycle that Sherlock will never be able to escape from. It is good he does not know this now, that his life will just be an inexorable grasp for an impossible perfection, or it is likely that he will give up.

Instead he sits and sucks on his cigarette. Never a quitter, not even for pursuits that will most probably kill him.

Sherlock watched as he felt the dull coldness penetrate his buttocks and upper thighs. He watched a blacked-out car pull up to the barrier, an employee step forward, be ushered back by those more important than himself. This higher authority continued its path, now unbarred by such trivialities as _BBC security_ , weaving round the parked cars until it stopped a short distance from the flowerbeds. If Sherlock had sprung off his makeshift seat he would probably have flown into it, it was that close, but that wasn’t something that Sherlock ever intended to do, it was merely an indicator of the vehicle’s closeness to his person.

With a slow and artificial fluidity, the back passenger window slid open.

“Fuck off.” Sherlock muttered before the glass had even half-finished its descent to reveal his brother, slightly less rotund but still just as annoying, sat amongst the plush leather and dark, polished wood of the car’s interior. Funny how Mycroft’s presence always extorted vulgarisms from him. There truly was something about his appearance that merited offensive lexemes.

“Or, as those with manners say: hello.” Mycroft’s faux-offended voice always got on Sherlock’s nerves and this particular outing was no exception.

“Come here to gloat? Because I’ve come here to have a cigarette and I’d appreciate you _not being here_.”

“I’m not here to gloat, Sherlock; I’m here to take you home.”

“ _Home_?” The presence of the word was enough for him to taste the bile. A bile dredged up from years of oppressed dissent, of being sided against in petty squabbles across the kitchen table; from the times he longed for somebody to just _beat him already_ , anything but this psychological warfare somehow restricted to him. Mycroft the manipulator; funny how he never used his talent for anything but his own ends, God forbid he would help his brother persecuted by parents with the Eldest Child Bias. The bile tasted like his childhood and he swore he would never go back there. Fuck Mycroft for making him, _fuck him_. “I am not going anywhere with you, even less that prison you call ‘home’.”

“I meant back to your dormitory, if you must be so pedantic. Was a figure of speech; you should have known that.”

Sherlock remained silent, dragging on his cigarette as he metaphorically dragged his heels. Mycroft may have appreciated the symbolism but he didn’t show it.

“If I have to instruct the driver to _haul_ you into this car then I will do it. All it will take is a word. I’m sure you’d rather go quietly.”

Sherlock Holmes is twelve years old, expelled, ordered into a car by three separate types of authority, none of which have even attempted to understand him. Not again, Holmes; didn’t you learn your lesson? I should have known it’d be you, Holmes. Holmes! My office, immediately.

He shrugged his shoulders, tossed his cigarette amongst the chrysanthemums – there had always been an irrational part of him that hated yellow flowers – and acquiesced, pacing towards the car and the door that hinged open with an almost supernatural timing. The leather was annoyingly comfortable and distracted him while the driver leapt out to slam the door on them, incarcerating the two brothers in the Mercedes.

It was dark inside the car.

“You do love the drama, don’t you.” Mycroft was first to address his sibling, merely because Sherlock was still thinking of something to say that didn’t involve the word ‘cunt’. The statement question was not replied to, so he continued: “There has to be a crowd, an audience for your display or it isn’t worth it, is it.”

“It’s bad practice to not inflect one’s questions.” Sherlock retorted; it was the only thing he could voice. “And it gets on my nerves.”

“Precisely why I do it. My, you do learn slowly.”

“Mycroft-” The snap was bitten back to save the driver from being privy to an unholy slanging match; Sherlock knew these things had a habit of escalating, especially when both parties had no aversion to pettiness on their own side. “You said you didn’t come here to gloat.”

“Yes, that’s correct. Although perhaps if I knew you’d been crying when I left I would have proceeded here with entirely different intentions.”

“I haven’t been crying!” Sherlock barked, leaping forward in his seat and causing the seatbelt to restrain him furiously, forgetting the situation in his indignance.

“There’s no point trying to deny it,” Mycroft had replied in an infuriatingly composed manner, gazing into the driver’s headrest, “if the red eyes weren’t already the most overt of giveaways, I have a virtual library full of instances when I observed you in tears. You have a face.”

“Of course I have a face, don’t be ridic-”

“The face you display when you are either on the verge of or are recovering from a bout of tear duct utilisation is the exact face you are displaying to me now.”

“No, this is my ‘I hate Mycroft’ face.”

The elder Holmes turned his gaze to inspect his brother’s features; his eyes flickered across cheekbones, momentarily to lock onto eyes, pause on the mouth, before nodding minutely and resolving: “The two are very similar.”

“ _‘Tear duct utilisation’_ ,” Sherlock muttered to himself, incredulous in his disdain. “You know, normal people just call it crying.”

“Please inform me if I ever become _‘normal’_ so I know precisely when to immolate myself.”

“And you say I’m dramatic.” Sherlock derided, silently agreeing with him.

“There is a difference between making grand statements in private, in the safety of one’s own car, than doing it on national television. But anyway. This meeting did have a _point_.”

One of Mycroft’s most persuasive attributes was transferral of guilt: to be blunt, it was probably why he always got away with so much as a child. Obvious parental leanings aside, Mycroft possessed the ability to influence people merely through his choice of words and inflection. Unfortunately, ‘people’ did not include Sherlock; the young boy remained – and still remains – untouched by Mycroft’s spin. He learnt to utilise it himself as a sort of defiance, but never on his family. There was a principle. Also it never worked when he tried, so that pretty much decided that principle for him.

“A point which I have somehow impeded by sitting here and listening to you bore me. Perfectly sensible.”

“I can very easily force you to walk.”

“Fine.”

He’d forgotten that approach was never going to work with Sherlock Holmes. Sighing loud enough for Sherlock to hear but quiet enough to not antagonise the man, Mycroft linked his fingers and rested the structure on his lap, staring over at his brother with a purposeful and staid gaze.

“I fear our previous exchanges may have negated what I am about to say, but I hope you take this as truth and do not consider it affected. Because… it isn’t.”

 _More matter with less art_ , Sherlock wanted to barb back, but he didn’t particularly want Mycroft to know that he’d read the dreaded Shakespeare. He was also sort of wary of the look his elder brother was sporting; the look he wore when… that stupid old woman, she had to go and die on them all. One thousand pounds in his bank balance didn’t bring her back or help at all; Mother and Father bought a car with their share and sang Don Giovanni all the way home while Sherlock sat in the back with his brother, wishing Frankenstein were an autobiography. “You wouldn’t want to, anyway;” Mycroft had spoken out to the dual carriageway, voice just about audible over the opera, “they say people change when they die. They go… different.” The children hadn’t been invited to the funeral; the adults chose their apathy.

That was probably one of the moments in Mycroft’s library that he was referring to. Somehow Sherlock wasn’t as ashamed to realise this as he thought he would be.

“It must feel… horrible, I suppose. Humiliating, perhaps.” The eldest Holmes dropped his chin; Sherlock simply watched him, tensed for the inevitable lecture and, somehow worst of all, the ‘I told you so’. “I may not be able to empathise but I understand how it is to set oneself impossible goals. So, I thought it would be best for you to know that… you did very well out there. Fantastically so. I’m sure… I’m sure that…”

There was a pause, a meeting of eye-lines, an uncharacteristic plea in the eyes of the younger: _Please don’t say _it_. Mycroft swallowed and compromised._

“We’re all very proud of you.”

It was a goddamned lie, but there you go. Somehow with both the brothers knowing it they found themselves content to play the charade a little longer.

“Thank you.” Sherlock murmured, largely meaning it. Perhaps what his brother had said was true; perhaps there was a part of Mycroft that did hold affection for Sherlock and his achievements. Maybe, one day, they’ll be able to sit in the back seat of a car and not be haunted by the spectres of a miserable past, not bicker about frivolous matters, not have their fraternal relationship blighted by blame.

Perhaps that’ll be the day that pigs fly out from a frozen hell, too.

“Hang on-” The realisation suddenly hit Sherlock like ideas tended to: forcefully, with sound effects of bullets, “you weren’t in the audience. You didn’t even _see me_.”

“I have my ways.” Mycroft tapped his nose and left it at that.

The automobile rumbled on, gently jolting its occupants as it trundled along the largely even tarmac. Sherlock stared at his linked thumbs, castigated himself for biting his fingernails – they had somehow been stained yellow through experiments or something; the provenance of the colour was unknown but Sherlock didn’t need that specific information to hate it. He then stared at Mycroft’s.

Ten minutes passed before the silence came to an end. It was a long journey to Cambridge, inevitably going to be made much longer by the company.

“You do understand that this little… _incident_ in no way changes my feelings towards you.” Mycroft piped up, voice low and stilted, rather like one of those artificial computer voices that Sherlock used to make recite vulgar poetry via remote control whenever the maid came to clean his room.

“I’d be disappointed if it did. Don’t want my burning hatred to be unrequited.”

He’s grown up a lot since then, but the Sherlock Holmes sitting with his brother in the car to Cambridge was not yet above infantilism. It was one of his best and worst characteristics; his very best being that he made it so you didn’t even care.

Mycroft coughed, “If anything, I think it might even be possible that I now despise you even more for not humiliating yourself and ruining this family’s reputation. By not doing so, you proved me wrong.”

“Well if I were you I’d start getting used to that.”

“Don’t be absurd, Sherlock.”

They’ll deny it in the future but the two men turn to one another and share the most cynical of smiles.


End file.
